


where the hands have been

by kazmir



Category: DCU (Comics), Nightwing (Comics), Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics)
Genre: Accidental Voyeurism, Antagonistic Relationship, Brief Depiction of Injury, Injured Dick Grayson, Jason Todd's A+ Medical Care, Jason Todd/Original Male Character (brief), M/M, Pre-Relationship, Unresolved Sexual Tension, slight jealousy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:09:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28342185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kazmir/pseuds/kazmir
Summary: Badly injured and caught in a storm, Dick takes shelter in a condemned building in the Narrows.It is, unfortunately, one of Red Hood’s safehouses.  Guess who happens to be home?
Relationships: Dick Grayson/Jason Todd
Comments: 16
Kudos: 215





	where the hands have been

**Author's Note:**

> Please be mindful of the tags, though nothing here is too explicit.

Just to be clear, Dick isn’t actually dying. 

But the deep slash to his left shoulder and the rope burns ringing his neck and wrists? Coupled with the stinging rain and dropping temperature, it sure as hell feels like he is.

Tonight’s definitely not Dick’s worst in Gotham, but it’s not going to get any better if he can’t get to shelter and a little warmth. 

He’s nowhere near the bike he’d stashed at the beginning of his patrol and at least a dozen blocks and a bridge away from his closest hideout. The grapple’s out since lifting his bum arm is out of the question and the idea of stumbling through back alleys incapacitated is just asking for trouble.

Calling for pick up’s always an option, but he’s in no kind of mood to get reamed by Bat, Sr. for missing check-in, or suffer the polite but passive-aggressive third degree from the old man’s old butler.

Time to improvise.

Dick eyes his GPS-enabled watch, the formerly pulsing red dot holding steady, and he knows he’s at the right building. It’s a sad and crumbling thing, painted over windows and a ‘condemned’ notice on the barred door, an old warehouse turned projects then shuttered when corruption peaked and siphoned assistance away from the Narrows’ poorest. 

Getting up the fire escape around back is sheer agony, wildfire spreading through his shoulder as whatever’s happened to coagulate tears open again and bleeds anew. It’s slow going, but he finally makes it to the fourth-floor landing, bare hands slipping on the wet handrails, heart pounding double time in his chest, breath ripping out of him.

The windows here are also whitewashed over, but cool to the touch with no light shining through the paint-streaked glass. No one home, hopefully. The middle one opens with a slight pop and a creak under his lockpick and he slides over the sill rear out and feet first. 

It’s a long drop to the floor and he rolls with the fall, rolls right onto his fucked shoulder. 

The pain takes his breath away and he grabs for his upper arm as stars explode in his vision and his hearing goes muffled. He clenches his tongue between his teeth and blood fills his mouth, hot and coppery at the back of his swollen throat.

Dick doesn’t know how long he lays there, drooling blood and spit on the dusty cement, but awareness comes back to him in degrees. First, that it’s dark, but it’s not completely dark. Second, it’s quiet, but it’s not completely quiet.

Eyes adjusted to the gloom, he spots piles of clothing littered about in front of him, a leather jacket draped over the back of the room’s solitary chair, the glint of a helmet laying face-down on a plastic-wrapped couch.

Flickering light spilling out from the bedroom door falls across a threadbare rug and on a pair of incredibly familiar thigh holsters, firearms and clips in place. He follows that beam of light up, up, up.

The door is cracked a good foot or so, just enough for Dick to see he’s picked a very, very bad night to break into Jason’s safehouse.

There’s a mattress on the floor, a sheet or thin blanket spilling out over the side. There’s Jason stretched out on that mattress, head propped on a pillow. And there’s the man on top of him, balanced on one forearm and jacking their cocks with the other.

_Christ_.

Jason’s silent but the man is loud – grunts loud and groans loud and breathes loud – sounds real but definitely exaggerated. His hand slips from their cocks and Dick can see even from here his fingers are dripping, glistening. Jason’s hands circle the man’s back and their hips move together, slow and rhythmic. Their bodies are pressed tight, the squelch and suck of sweat and precome.

The man turns his face into Jason’s neck and says something that startles a breathy laugh out of him. Jason turns the man’s face to his and then they’re kissing, leisurely and deep and in time with the rock of their hips.

Heat prickles under Dick’s skin as he watches the man mouth at Jason’s neck and tongue at his pulse point, something indescribable swooping low in his belly as Jason’s head tips back into the pillow, as his hand slides down the other man’s back, kneads his ass slow and thorough.

It’s painfully intimate and painfully private and Dick’s gotta get the hell out of here, stat. He may even be able to get out of here unnoticed. Well, the blood all over the window and floor will be a dead giveaway come sunrise, but he’ll be halfway to Bludhaven by then.

Yes, get up and get out.

Not without considerable effort, Dick gets a leg under him, gathers his core and presses himself up onto his knees. A wave of dizziness washes over him and he sways to the side, reaches out with his good palm to steady himself and –

_Plink!_

The lockpick he’d forgotten in his palm clatters to the cement, clinks once and spins away into the dark. The sound is deafening. It won’t go unheard. And it doesn’t.

A shadow darkens the doorway, blocking out the light, and then Jason’s on him. A cold muzzle digs into the soft flesh beneath his jaw, hot fingers digging into the tattered remains of the front of his suit.

“What the _fuck_ ,” Jason hisses.

Dick tries to make a grab for the gun, but his shoulder screams. Tries to speak, but his swollen throat has stolen his voice. Jason’s face screws up into something ugly, and he pushes Dick away from him, letting him fall against the wall with a solid bang. The pain is – the pain is unbelievable. He grits his teeth and blows out hard through his nose, in and out, in and out.

Over the blood rushing in his ears, he hears a murmur from the other room. Jason stands over him, scarred and bruised and shamelessly erect and bare. “It’s alright. No worries. Just my dumbass, drunk ass brother. Must have come in through the window.”

Another murmur.

“No, it’s fine,” Jason says, voice oddly calm in a way his face isn’t. “Stay there. I’ll be back in a second.”

Time passes strangely, then.

Dick’s on the cement floor, and then he’s in the tub. 

The bathroom’s empty, and then it isn’t.

Dick rolls his head to the side. Jason is still naked as the day he was born, perched on the toilet lid and flipping a smartphone around and around in his hand, pinning him with an unmistakably furious glare.

"Welcome back, asshole,” Jason says, and smacks the phone down on the lip of the tub nearest Dick’s head. “You need to call one of your Bats to get you.”

“Not calling,” Dick rasps.

Jason sucks at his teeth, then gets up and walks out, shutting the door behind him with a click. 

Dick doesn’t know how long he’s gone, the passage of time marked only by how the pain in his body shifts and shifts, the way the small window up above lightens from dark to a tinge of gray morning light, rain still battering at the glass.

When Jason returns, it’s with a glass of water and a plastic case in hand. He flips the overhead light on without warning and Dick recoils, slams his eyes shut behind his cracked domino mask.

“Oh, shut up,” Jason says, retaking his seat on the toilet and moving the phone to set the glass down.

Dick uses what little strength he’s got left in his legs to push himself up where he’s slid down in tub and reaches for the glass with his good arm. 

Jason intercepts with a couple of pills. “Percocet,” he says plainly, dumping them into Dick’s palm. “You’re gonna need ‘em if you want _me_ playing your fuckin’ nursemaid.”

Yeah. Yeah, that tracks. Dick takes the pills, swallowing them one by one with small sips of water, throat so inflamed and tight he’s surprised they even go down at all.

“How did you even find this place, huh? You got a tracker on me?”

Dick shakes his head, because he really, honestly doesn’t. He only knows about this safehouse because Babs does, had tailed Red Hood here once when some kingpin’s lieutenant floated up from the bay bottom, headless. Jason’s old MO, though it turned out not to be his doing in the end.

“Alright,” Jason says. “You didn’t know I’d be here?”

Again, he shakes his head.

“So you thought you’d just bust into an empty fucking hidey hole in the middle of the night, bleed out all over the fucking floor. Good plan. It’s a wonder _I_ was the one who bit it.” Jason laughs mean and sharp. “Alright, Boy Blunder. Time for Doctor Todd.”

His hands are methodical, snipping away at the top of Dick’s uniform with a pair of trauma shears. The light armor tugs at the sticky blood that’d spilled out over his shoulder and down his front, but Jason eases it away from his skin with a large alcohol pad. Slow and steadily, he’s peeled and cut out of his Nightwing suit with hands that still smell like sex, like unfamiliar cologne and woodsy soap.

It's cold in the bathroom, but Jason’s skin shines with a light sweat and beads along his forehead, dampens the wild tufts of short curls falling over his brow. His eyes flicker often from the stitch and tape job he’s doing and up to Dick’s eyes, frowning a bit when Dick doesn’t look away the way he probably ought to.

He can see every pore from this distance, every freckle and scar. The color of his eyes, not quite blue and not quite brown. The marked collarbone and purpling bite where shoulder meets neck. The blunt scratches down his side, red and raised and fresh.

“I didn’t know you slept with men,” he blurts, voice gravelly.

Jason’s hands go deathly still, if only for a moment before picking back up on the final stitch. “I’m going to let that go, because I’m pretty sure you’re high as fuck right now. But I’ll tell you one thing, and that’s that it’s one hundred percent not your fucking business.”

_Snip_.

“I’m sorry,” Dick says.

“Lift your head up.”

He does. Jason dips his fingers into a jar of viscous jelly, then slathers it onto the ligature marks ringing Dick’s neck, the ones around his wrists. The sting is minimal and far away. _He_ feels far away. Jason hefts him out of the tub and bathroom, depositing him on the plasticky couch with what feels like gentleness, but maybe it’s not. The percs are definitely working.

“Dick.”

“Hmm.”

There are strong and gloved fingers on his jaw, then, turning his face away from the pillow and into the light. He opens his eyes to see Jason lean down over him, smelling clean and like himself and not like whoever had been in his bed. He’s dressed this time, helmet on but the face shield is flipped open and up.

“Whatever you saw tonight,” Jason says, “is between you and me. Just you and me and nobody else. You understand?”

Dick nods, feeling warm, and drifts away.

When he wakes next, the room is dim in late afternoon light. The scent of bleach is heavy on the air, cutting through that odd ozone smell of the thunderstorm raging outside. Every sign of Jason is gone, just like he’d known it would be. Clothing gone, mattress stripped, blood scrubbed from the floor.

On the chair, which has been dragged over to the couch, rests a sealed bottle of water, a single pill, and the burner smartphone. He takes the pill and drinks the water and isn’t surprised to see the news alert ticking across the home screen that the building he’d been held at for two days had burned to the ground.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is a slightly misquoted lyric from _Born Under Punches_ by The Talking Heads. [(listen on youtube)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6T_X7MXg40)


End file.
